


Alicanto

by Anonymous



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:25:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Evy and Rick and the Chinchorro mummies.





	Alicanto

**Author's Note:**

  * For [russian_blue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/gifts).



**The Atacama Desert, many thousands of years ago**

  
Life is delicate, here, in the most arid corner of the world. Vast sweeps of nothingness--land into which no man ventures and no life thrives--the Atacama. Dotted along the edges, trapped on a narrow strip between dry land and surging ocean, strung out along the coast like a handful of pebbles scattered by a careless hand, are the villages of the Chinchorro. Expert fisherpeople, dependant on the tides of the sea for their food and the whims of the desert rains for their water. Some years, the catches are good, the rain comes, and the people smile. Other years, life--and those who depart it--are preserved in the only ways the people know how.

  
In this land there was once, we can not know when precisely, a time of great drought and sorrow. In that time, a beautiful Chinchorro maiden called Añañuca fell in love with a mysterious stranger from far away. He arrived one day in a scour of desert wind, seeking the fabled vein of treasure lurking deep beneath the dunes. Each day he would go out into the desert and return empty-handed, each night she would try to bind him to her with her beauty, her love, and her child.  
But what can hold a man in love with a legend?

  
One night, while the little family lay sleeping, the man was visited by an Alicanto--a beautiful bird with feathers of mingled gold and silver and copper. The Alicanto whispered to the man the location of the lost treasure and then soared out into the night. Dazzled by the lights of its plumage, he got up and followed it into star-studded oblivion, leaving Añañuca sleeping peacefully and unaware.

  
The next morning, she woke up alone. All day she waited, as she always had, but that night, and for every night thereafter, her lover did not return.

  
Añañuca roamed the village and the desert for weeks on end, her daughter strapped to her chest, wailing her love and her grief into the winds. Day followed day followed day until first her daughter, and then she became one with the desert sands.  
That night, the skies cried for Añañuca and her lost child. In the morning, when the sun touched the sand where she lay, it revealed thousands of beautiful red and purple flowers, carpeting the desert, painting the sand--the spirit of Añañuca, remaining forever close to those she loved.

  
And as for what became of her lover and the treasure of the Atacama? Well, only the Alicanto knows the truth of that.

  
________________________

  
  
**London, England. February, 1939.**

  
“We just got back, Evy.” Dropping his rucksack with a thud, Rick throws himself backwards onto the shrouded couch in their drawing room. The white sheet that has been covering it in their absence shifts under him and releases a puff of dust. “I was thinking we could have, oh, I don't know, a night or two to sleep in our own bed before succumbing yet again to the lure of adventure."

  
“I know, I know, but this letter from the Chilean cultural minister is...most intriguing.” His wife grins back at him, her eyes sparkling, and waves a much-crumpled missive in his direction. Rick makes a half-hearted grab for the letter, but Evy holds it out of his reach, dancing back, and he subsides.

  
_I never should have let her check the mail._

  
He flops over on his side, reaching underneath his legs to smooth the dust-cover where it was bunching uncomfortably beneath him and then flops back, laying one long leg over the low back of the sofa. God, it's been a long week--first that giant dust-up at Tanis, then the nightmare with the bags in Frankfurt, the fly-by visit to Alex at Rugby and that dick of a Housemaster. Across the room, Evy flits around purposefully, as though none of it touched her store of energy. Brows knit, she grasps the letter between her teeth and reaches up to grab a book from one of the shelves that line the hallway.

  
Caught by the expression of intense focus on her face--a feminine version of the one his son had worn this morning while laying out his case for being allowed to leave school early--Rick smiles to himself. “Chile as in…” He racks his mind. “The jungle? Or the island with the giant--whattayacallem--head statues?”

  
“The Atacama, actually.” Evy flips a few pages, looks up at him and smiles excitedly. He's caught by the glitter of her spectacles. “The driest and most arid desert known to man. It can go years without significant rainfall, although according to the cultural minister the current five year drought is the longest on record.”

  
“You make it sound so alluring.”

  
“Since Max Uhle and his team left in the late twenties there have been no professional excavations of the northern reaches of the country, but now miners in Arica, north of Antofagasta--”she sounds it out, carefully, “have uncovered mummified remains and some strange happenings are afoot.”

  
“Mummies!” Rick springs up from the couch, catching his foot in the heavy velvet drape concealing the large bay windows and bringing the rod and fabric clattering down.

  
Evy pivots easily on the ball of her foot, avoiding the falling drapery without looking up from the book she holds in her hand. Abstractedly, she reaches back to her mass of long hair and withdraws a pencil from the depths, underlines a phrase and sticks it back. As she does, another pencil works its way out of her curls and clatters to the floor.

  
“Oh, not those kind of mummies, dear. An entirely different cultural practice--thousands of years before the Egyptians. The Chinchorro.”

  
She side steps around Rick as he flails his way out of the drapery and pushes to his feet.

  
“Did you know that there is a remarkable crossover of cultures living in climates where natural mummification occurs and cultures that undertake ritual mummification?”

  
“Oddly, I did know that.” He kicks at the curtain rod and it rebounds and smacks him in the shin with a metallic whang. “Ouch.”

  
“In fact, unlike in Egyptian society where mummification was a right of the privileged social class, the Chinchorro preserved all kinds of people--women, children, even infants and fetuses. Truly a fascinating...” She trails off, caught by something in the book she’s perusing.

  
“Evelyn, darling...”

  
She hmms and flips another page.

  
“Evelyn!”

  
She looks up and smiles a brilliant beam, clapping the book shut decisively. “Añañuca.”

  
“Anna..wha now?”

  
Evy advances toward him, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose, face bright with the fervid excitement of discovery.

  
_May as well start packing now._

  
“Añañuca. I believe she is the key. It’s a much later legend, dating to the time of the Incan empire and Spanish occupation but,” she waves a dismissive hand, “you know how these things do get jumbled.” Her voice drops to storytelling cadence. “A beautiful maiden, a mysterious lover from far away in search of the lost treasure of the desert.”

  
“Treasure?” Rick raises one eyebrow in mock consideration and Evy swats at him with the book before continuing.

  
“Yes, one of the veins of gold the government mines these days, no doubt, or perhaps a reference to the lost treasure of the Inca.” She flips a page. “Anyway, the man goes out into the desert.”

  
“Let me guess: he never returned?”

  
She blinks at him. “No, he didn't.”

  
Rick waggles his fingers through the air. “And her spirit wanders the desert still, in search of her lost love?”

  
“Actually, no, Mr. Know-It-All. Her grief was so great that she died of sorrow--”

  
“Ah, there’s the happy ending I knew was lurking somewhere at the heart of this tale.”

  
“--AND the villagers buried her and her body became ‘one with the desert.’” Evy flips through the pages and waves the underlined phrase in his direction. “I suspect that is a metaphor for the mummification process, you see?” She whisks the book back.

  
“Beautiful. So the mummies…?”

  
“Could be the key to the lost gold mines of the Inca!”

  
“Mummies.” He repeats. “And treasure. What could possibly go wrong?”

  
She smiles at him, curls up to him and grabs one lapel, bringing his face down to hers for a kiss. “Don’t worry, the Chinchorro were a nonliterate society. No written language that we know of. No books, no incantations. Perfectly safe.” She pats him on the chest.

  
“Oh goody.”  
****

**Author's Note:**

> So, much in the way the actual Mummy movies did with Egyptian mythology, I have twisted Chilean history mythology all up for the intro. The legend of Añañuca is genuine, but I altered a bunch of the details and combined it with the separate legends of the Alicanto and stories of hidden Inca gold. 
> 
> The Chinchorro mummies date from 7,000 to 1,500 BCE and come from a much older civilization unrelated to the Inca (although, as Evy notes, these things do tend to get mixed up).
> 
> Ideally this would be the set up for a movie-length sequel that I am, sadly, not capable of writing.


End file.
